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Japan Developing Diamond-based Semiconductors
s spencer and others wrote in with submissions about Japan funding the development of diamond-based semiconductors to replace silicon chips. The main advantages of diamond include heat resistance and higher electrical resistance.
pentium iii=mitsubishi?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I heard in asia that people give mobile phones with diamonds in them as engagement rpesents, so maybe they are taking a stab at the engagement market :)>
"Pentiums are a girl's best friend"?
Okay, that's not funny. Taking off Score +1 Bonus.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
She's been pushing for a diamond for a little while now - I wonder if she'll be upset if she gets it in chip form rather than the traditional ring?
I'm glad they waited until after I bought an engagement ring...
Intel may now become the United States largest diamond importer.
Just as long as the jewelry store doesn't put up a sign saying "Intel Insides Inside"
Imagine the overclocking!
Actually diamonds are neither rare nor intrinsically valuable. The only reason that they cost so much at the jewelry store is because of the monopoly of debeers. They pretty much control all the diamonds in the world. if they wanted they could manufacture diamonds out of coal instead of mining them. It is not a lack of supply that makes them expensive but the fact that one company controls all the supply.
Diamonds are expensive for the same reason that Win2k costs $200 per seat. Actually, I prefer emeralds myself.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
When I was at Auburn, we had Star Wars funding to look into this. We had created a diode that switched at 2000 celcius.
The idea was to have IC circuits right inside the rocket engines.
There is (at least) one key advantage silicon has over diamond (or any semiconductor except Germanium). It has a self-repairing crystal lattice. When dopant atoms (phosphorous, arsenic, etc.) are injected into the bulk silicon wafer using ion implantation (diffusion not used in practice too much anymore) they cause structural damage to the crystal lattice which would hurt circuit performace. However, Silicon has this magical property that if you heat it up to the right temperature (several hundred degrees Celcius) the lattice begins to reorganize itself to incorporate the dopant atoms without damage. Tis process is called Annealing and it is one of the key reasons Silicon became the dominant semiconductor (the other was the availability of a good thermal oxide, SiO2).
Diamond does not have this desirable property, so a lot of research will have to go into maintaining the quality of the crystal lattice.
Here's some background on diamond films:
In July of this year, scientists in the United States reported that isotopically pure diamond films (containing 99.9% carbon-12 and not the 1% carbon-13 that is present in natural diamonds) had been grown. The pure films not only conducted hear 50% better than the best natural diamonds but also withstood damage by laser radiation ten times more effectively than natural diamond.
One could have the concept of combining functions: Glass that serves as a semiconductor, etc. Interesting.
I don't know if manufactured diamonds theaten the jewelry industry, but I doubt it. Although hundreds of almost-slaves labor in mines so deep it's scary, and the industry is full of creepy deals, people buy them, and the industry churns them out just the same.
mug
Yes Diamonds are better than Silicon but:
You still cannot get past some limmiting factors like speed of light and the absolute minnimum structure size.
What the Japanease are looking into will be very large chips. Diamonds are the only good way to get a good yeilds of these. But still when you have a 10x10mm 100 GHz chip it takes several clock cycles to get some information from one side of the chip to the other.
Normal design methodologies will no longer work in the near future just like they are starting to get difficult now. (Moore's Law slowing down)
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
I got my girl a diamond earing so she had some processing power above the neck.
Now SHE wants a beowulf cluster of these.
if they wanted they could manufacture diamonds out of coal instead of mining them
Not just yet. Other companies have manufactured diamonds, but they get cloudy after a few years. When this gets solved, you'll hear about it.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
These chips will not be based on cut diamond wafers in the way today chips are based on cut silicon wafers because it's pretty much impossible to cut diamond. Rather they would be based on evaporated diamond films (like the SOI - Silicon On Insulator - technique).
The fact that diamond is more suitable at higher temperatures is due to it's large band-gap: 5.5 eV (Si has 1.1 eV). So even at high temperature diamond is an (very good) isolator (very pure Si is also an good isolator at room temperature but it gets a lot more conductive at higher temperatures due to its small band gap). This large band-gap is also the reason why diamond would be a candidate for UV LEDs or lasers (UV starts at about 3eV). OTOH, Silicon with 1.1eV is in the infrared. BTW, the 235nm radiation they mention in the article corresponds to ~5.2 eV.
The idea of using diamond as a semiconductor has been kicking around for years with quite a bit of research being done world wide.
Technology Research News has an article published in September that discusses this.
Among other things they mention that diamond's charge carrier mobility is three times better.
Diamond transistors could in theory deliver one watt of power at 100 gigahertz, or billion cycles per second, said Isberg. This is five times faster has been achieved using the semiconductor Gallium Arsenide.
Diamond-based electronics would also be better than existing semiconductor materials for high-temperature applications, said Isberg. Diamond conducts heat 15 times more efficiently than silicon, and therefore cools faster.
etc. etc.
www.bannination.com Two things float to the top he
- Diamonds, as used in jewelry, are artificially rare. That's right.. the rock on your engagement ring is only rare because DeBeers & friends keep millions and millions of diamonds locked up in vaults. This is not conspiracy theory... it's a verifiable fact.
- The average cost of diamond, if all diamonds available were in circulation, instead of in vaults, would be about $1.50 per ct.
- Small diamonds, the kind used in diamond saws, industry, etcetera, are NOT expensive, like your engagement ring. Small diamonds are common and cheap, because they have no real jewelry market. Diamond impregnated stones and blades cost more because it costs more to manufacture them.. not because of the diamond.
- Good luck convincing your girl of ANY of this. You still have to buy that rock. Get over it..
hmmmm...maybe. We still don't know what the raw performance of these dia-chips will be. No doubt you are thinking "oh, 1000 degC, that is great for overclocking." But do you really want the equivalent of a blast furnace on your desktop? And, what kind of logic board and surface traces will be able to manage that kind of heat? The answer is, none at all.
These are very special duty devices. They will end up in the exhaust manifold of your car, not the logic board of your PC. They will be built and deployed to resist failure under heat, and might not run even as fast as what you can buy today; clock speed will probably not even make it into the requirements document.
So this is no answer to Moore's Law, more like Murphy's Law; trying to get something that is far less likely to go wrong in places where traditional chips go wrong all the time. Thus we can extend the technology we know well (digital computing) into new places (harsh environments.) It will be interesting to see what they do with that...launch a compact space probe into the corona of the sun? Drop one into an erupting volcano to float around and send data? Lots of stuff comes to mind.
But not overclocking.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
...include... higher electrical resistance.
Is that all it takes? I have lots of stuff here that might be groundbreaking...
World awed by carpet-based semiconductor
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Artificial diamonds most certaintly do not "look wrong".
According to the NOVA program "Diamond Deception" originally broadcast on 2/01/2000, "These synthetic diamonds are such good copies of the real thing that they not only have the identical atomic structure but can even replicate their flaws."
Keep in mind that this article was written in 1982. It talks about prices dropping from $60,000 per carat to $30,000 a carat. The colapse it predicts happened in the early '90s, and prices of "perfect" diamonds are now quoted around $5,000 per carat, and can be had for slightly over $1,500 per carat without much trouble. The article also talks about resale values of diamonds being 40% of their retail value. Today, diamonds 1 carat and smaller are essentially worthless. Large retail jewlery chains are still maintaining a significant markup, but that is steadily decreasing now that the public has greater access to wholesale diamonds.
.25 carat diamonds in a custom setting she designed. $900) I saw another guy buy a 2.9 carat diamond engagement ring for $3500. It wasn't flawless, but it was an excelent stone, and impractically large.
If she has to have a diamond (even after reading that article), do a little research and buy a loose stone from a wholesale vendor. It's not hard to find one, and you can get a local jewler to make you a very nice setting for $100-300. For two months salary these days, she can have a ring that will give her a workout. When I purchased my fiancee's ring (a 2.72 carat saphire with two